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2015 Property Innovation Summit at a Glance

This year’s Property Innovation Summit was keynoted by best-selling business book author and leadership consultant Jack Zenger, whose agency has conducted 360-degree feedback reviews with 80,000 Fortune 500 executives. “What do the best leaders share in common?” A willingness to challenge the status quo, powerful and clear communications, a focus on speed, developing a strategy collectively, reciprocal trust, accessibility, and having an intimately friendly relationship with co-workers. “Trust leads to greater innovation,” said Zenger.

Grit was a hot-button topic on the stage delivered by MacArthur Fellow Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth, author of “The Key to Success? Grit.” After defining “grit” as the capacity to sustain hard labor, Duckworth emphasized “deliberate practice” as being most effective to developing grit. She defined four features of grit, which included picking a stretch goal, concentrating 100 percent on the task at hand (not multi-tasking), receiving immediate feedback on one’s performance, and proactively repeating the task until achieving fluency.

Forrester research analyst Frank Gillett followed by his colleague Ellen Carney spoke about trending in the Internet of Things and the connected home. From lighting and security systems, climate control and energy monitoring devices, Gillett said the common interface that will drive consumer adoption of the smart home is the smartphone. While installation and integrating the various WiFi devices will be a challenge and limit wide acceptance, the invention of “appcessories” and the z-wave wireless protocol will allow individual devices to bunny-hop their way to the home’s Net connection, eventually making the automated home a commonplace reality. Ellen Carney highlighted the entrance of Amazon Home Services and Google’s auto policy rate comparison site as powerful players making inroads in insurance. “Similar to roadside assistance, insurers need to step up their offerings with additional services beyond underwriting, to help solve problems and make life easier for consumers,” said Carney.

Other speakers on Day 1 included Dan Sterling, CEO of the promising startup Water Hero, developers of an innovative in-line water pipe sensor monitor controllable by a smartphone app and designed to shut off water supply after a broken pipe is automatically detected.

On Day 2 of the event, Frank “Catch me if you can” Abagnale shared his remarkable life story that led to his serving 39 years fighting crimes against the government as an FBI investigator.
“Because of today’s digital technology, it is 4,000 times easier to commit fraud today than it was 50 years ago,” he said. Looking out at the audience he said, “There’s not a single one of you, including myself, who hasn’t had their identity stolen.” Abagnale bemoaned the dearth of ethics education in our public schools, envisioning an evil future where vehicles could be commandeered remotely for nefarious purposes and heart pacesetters could be turned off from a thousand-mile distance. He shared frightening statistics: $5 billion in fraudulent IRS tax return checks; $100B in Medicare/Medicaid malpractice; $900B in annual white collar fraud. He advised the use of Positive Pay and secure micro-cut paper shredders.

Also on stage was Dennis Squibb of Farmers Insurance, “an adjuster at heart” who shared his positive ROI experiences working with his carriers SIU department to combat soft fraud in everyday theft claims thanks to the deployment of ContentsAnalyzer, the only anti-fraud solution that examines anomalies at the claim line detail. CA compares the value of each claim line item against external data points, such as average retail cost and replacement cost values, searching for pricing irregularities and flagging opportunistic fraud. “As many as 80% of claims show a 20% inflation of loss items. In less than 12 months, Enservio software produced a 40% increase in quality referrals to the SIU, millions of dollars saved, and a stick rate of 48%,” said Squibb.

Widely regarded as the insurance industry’s premier thought-leadership conference, this year’s Property Innovation Summit could not be made possible without the generous sponsorship of the following companies: CoreLogic, Donan, Fourseventy, Innovation Group, Itel, Mapbox, Rytech, and Symbility.